Delicious and Firefox

February 24, 2005

I finally managed to blow up my Firefox extensions the other day, probably the result of having been adding and deleting and adding and deleting and adding and deleting extensions since way back in the early betas. So, I ended up just deleting my Firefox settings folder (after saving my bookmarks) and starting over.

The good news is that it got rid of a lot of cruft that I really wasn’t using (and hey, that really does speed things up). The bad news is that I’m now going through cycles of remembering yet another extension I need (usually right when I need it) and adding it and restarting. I’m also finding some nifty new upgrades and alternatives though, so it’s all to the good.

Firefox & Del.icio.us

Two great tastes that go great together. If you don’t use del.icio.us, you really should start.

Delicious is a “social bookmark manager”. You add bookmarks to your delicious page, and tag them (yes, another folksonomy tool), and then you can go find them again.

So what?

Well, the simple answer is that that’s 300+ bookmarks that I didn’t have to save when I deleted my Firefox settings. I’ve also got my bookmarks on any machine I happen to be using, only a web page away. But it’s much better than that.

When you tag a bookmark, you get to see who all else has tagged the same one. You can then go look at their bookmarks (I find a lot of nifty stuff that way). Or you can go look at all of the bookmarks that have a certain tag (such as “CSS“), or the most popular bookmarks of the moment.

But wait, there’s more…

You can “subscribe” to someone else’s bookmarks, or to a given tag, and have them appear in your “delicious inbox.” That way when someone posts a new “widget” bookmark, you have it instantly.

Even better, all of this has RSS feeds. You can add del.icio.us/popular, or a tag such as del.icio.us/tag/css to your favorite RSS reader (I use Bloglines) and see what’s new at a glance. You can even add the RSS feed of your delicious inbox.

Delicious & Firefox

So, down to Firefox. There are a lot of nifty del.icio.us related extensions to Firefox, but the most useful one (in my opinion) is the basic delicious extension. This extension adds context menu (what you get when you right click) options to let you add the current page to del.icio.us, or go directly to your del.icio.us page, plus a couple of other things. It’s handy, and it makes using del.icio.us about as simple as adding a local bookmark.

I also found these nifty Delicious Search plugins—these add searches for delicious (your bookmarks) and delicious (everybody’s bookmarks) to the search box at the top of Firefox’s page.